Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 60:240 (Oct 1903)
Article: The Manifold Wisdom Of God As Seen Through His Church
Author: Henry Woodward Hulbert

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The Manifold Wisdom Of God As Seen Through His Church1

Prof. Henry Woodward Hulbert

The phenomenon of denominationalism was never so clearly or so seriously or so sanely before Christendom as it is in the white light of to-day. Tarn where you will, you find honest minds probing into this question, and seeking some reasonable way out of the difficulties involved. Especially is this true in the English-speaking world, where the various phases of the problem are being vigorously and exhaustively discussed, and where considerable movements have been initiated looking to an abatement of the evils involved in what seems to be an unwarrantable multiplicity of divisions in Protestantism. The late Lambeth Conference, in throwing down the gauntlet of union by absorption, in its memorable “four articles,” did but voice a sentiment which has been growing with a startling momentum among all earnest minds for more than a generation. In the face of this wide-spread tendency, each denomination has been under moral compulsion to make conscientious study of its very raison d’être. It would be strange, indeed, if, out of all this investigation, some remarkable and most hopeful transformations should not take place. Already the federation of the Presbyterian churches of Australasia, the coming together of the two Scotch denominations into the Free United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, the federation of the Free churches in

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England, and several similar movements, more or less tentative in character, in China and Japan and India and America, make clear that an issue of vast proportions, and of the utmost significance to the kingdom of God, is upon us, and must be fairly faced.

The infelicities of Protestant denominationalism are obvious to all who give them any serious attention. They are especially in evidence wherever Christianity comes into close contact with her ancient and inveterate foes on pagan fields, or with vast bodies of worshipers of the true God in a state of arrested development, such as the Hebrew, and the oriental and mediæval (Latin), and other churches that call themselves Christian; or with an ever-present multitude of confused or doubting souls that get their moral stamina by heredity and absorption, but in the main are critical of the churches and their seemingly conflicting symbols. Even though Buddhism far outranks Christianity in the number of her warring sects; and even though Hinduism is perplexing to the extreme in the multiplicity of her types; and even though Mohammedanism has more than doubled the number of sects prophesied by Muhammad, who said, “Verily, it will happen to my people as it did to the Children of Israel. Th...